"The person who meets the problems of human
life successfully acts as if he recognized, fully and spontaneously, that the
fundamental meaning of life is interest in and co-operation with other people.
Everything he does seems to be guided by the interests of his fellow beings, and
where he encounters difficulties he tries to overcome them in ways that do not
impinge on the welfare of others...

"We are not determined by our experiences but
are self-determined by the meaning we give to them; and when we take particular
experiences as the basis for our future life we are almost certain to be
misguided to some degree. Meanings are not determined by situations. We
determine ourselves by the meanings we ascribe to situations."

"Men seek
retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains;
and thou too are wont to desire such things very much. But this is
altogether a mark of the common sort of men, for it is in thy power
whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with
more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his
own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by
looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquillity. . .above all
do not distract or strain thyself, but be free, and look at things as a
man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal. But among the things
readiest to thy hand to which thou shalt turn, let there be these, which
are two. One is that things do not touch the soul, for they are external
and remain immovable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion
which is within. The other is that all these things, which thou seest,
change immediately and will no longer be; and constantly bear in mind how
many of these changes thou hast already witnessed. The universe is
transformation: life is opinion."

"The desire
for money takes the place of all genuinely human needs. Thus the apparent
accumulation of wealth is really the impoverishment of human nature, and
its appropriate morality is the renunciation of human nature and desires
-- asceticism. The effect is to substitute an abstraction, Homo
economicus, for the concrete totality of human nature, and thus to
dehumanize human nature. In this dehumanized human nature man loses
contact with his own body, more specifically with his senses, with
sensuality and with the pleasure-principle. And this dehumanized human
nature produces an inhuman consciousness, whose only currency is
abstractions divorced from real life -- the industrious, coolly rational,
economic, prosaic mind. Capitalism has made us so stupid and one-sided
that objects exist for us only if we can possess them or if they have
utility.

"...Having
no real aim, acquisitiveness, as Aristotle correctly said, has no limit.
Hence the psychological premise of a market economy is not, as in
classical theory of exchange, that the agents know what they want, but
that they do not know what they want. In advanced capitalist countries
advertising exists to create irrational demands and keep the consumer
confused; without the consumer confusion perpetuated by advertising, the
economy would collapse...

"No one has
denounced the dehumanizing consequences of the civilized division of labor
more emphatically than Marx. It is fatal to freedom; it produces the
development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all other
faculties, and to subdivide a man's faculties is to kill him; it produces
a crippled monstrosity, industrial pathology; intelligence is alienated
into the process as a whole while the individual specialist becomes stupid
and ignorant. More dispassionately, Durkheim has demonstrated that the
division of labor is not a consequence of the individual's search for
happiness and does not promote the happiness of the individual; progress,
the work of the division of labor, has nothing to do with human happiness."

"When I
confront a human being as my You [thou] and speak the basic word I-You to
him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things.

"He is no
longer He or She, limited by other Hes and Shes, a dot in the world grid
of space and time, nor a condition that can be experienced and described,
a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is You
and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but
everything else lives in his light.

"Even as a
melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a statue of
lines -- one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity -- so
it is with the human being to whom I say You. I can abstract from him the
color of his hair or the color of his speech or the color of his
graciousness; I have to do this again and again; but immediately he is no
longer You.

"...I do
not find the human being to whom I say You in any Sometime and Somewhere.
I can place him there and have to do this again and again, but immediately
he becomes a He or a She, an It, and no longer remains my You.

"As long
as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality
cower at my heels, and the whirl of doom congeals.

"The human
being to whom I say You I do not experience. But I stand in relation to
him, in the sacred basic word. Only when I step out of this do I
experience him again. Experience is remoteness from You.

"The
relation can obtain even if the human being to whom I say You does not
hear it in his experience. For You is more than It knows. You does more,
and more happens to it, than It knows. No deception reaches this far: here
is the cradle of actual life."

"We
have, in my view, created a society in which people find it harder and
harder to show one another basic affection. In place of the sense of
community and belonging, which we find such a reassuring feature of less
wealthy (and generally rural) societies, we find a high degree of
loneliness and alienation. Despite the fact that millions live in close
proximity to one another, it seems that many people, especially among the
old, have no one to talk to but their pets. Modern industrial society
often strikes me as being like a huge self-propelled machine. Instead of
human beings in charge, each individual is a tiny, insignificant component
with no choice but to move when the machine moves."

"Can any
rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human document?
We now know pretty well where the various books came from, and about when
they were written. We know that they were written by human beings who had
no knowledge of science, little knowledge of life, and were influenced by
the barbarous morality of primitive times, and were grossly ignorant of
most things that men know today. For instance, Genesis says that God made
the earth, and he made the sun to light the day and the moon to light the
night, and in one clause disposes of the stars by saying that 'he made the
stars also.' This was plainly written by someone who had no conception of
the stars. Man, by the aid of his telescope, has looked out into the
heavens and found stars whose diameter is as great as the distance between
the earth and the sun. We know that the universe is filled with stars and
suns and planets and systems. Every new telescope looking further into the
heavens only discovers more and more worlds and suns and systems in the
endless reaches of space. The men who wrote Genesis believed, of course,
that this tiny speck of mud that we call the earth was the center of the
universe, the only world in space, and made for man, who was the only
being worth considering. These men believed that the stars were only a
little way above the earth, and were set in the firmament for man to look
at, and for nothing else. Everyone today knows that this conception is not
true.

"The
origin of the human race is not as blind a subject as it once was. Let
alone God creating Adam out of hand, from the dust of the earth, does
anyone believe that Eve was made from Adam's rib--that the snake walked
and spoke in the Garden of Eden--that he tempted Eve to persuade Adam to
eat an apple, and that it is on that account that the whole human race was
doomed to hell--that for four thousand years there was no chance for any
human to be saved, though none of them had anything whatever to do with
the temptation; and that finally men were saved only through God's son
dying for them, and that unless human beings believed this silly,
impossible and wicked story they were doomed to hell? Can anyone with
intelligence really believe that a child born today should be doomed
because the snake tempted Eve and Eve tempted Adam? To believe that is not
God-worship; it is devil-worship.

"Can
anyone call this scheme of creation and damnation moral? It defies every
principle of morality, as man conceives morality. Can anyone believe today
that the whole world was destroyed by flood, save only Noah and his family
and a male and female of each species of animal that entered the Ark?
There are almost a million species of insects alone. How did Noah match
these up and make sure of getting male and female to reproduce life in the
world after the flood had spent its force? And why should all the lower
animals have been destroyed? Were they included in the sinning of man?
This is a story which could not beguile a fairly bright child of five
years of age today."

Will you interrupt your work
for a moment and play the game of philosophy with me?

"I am attempting to face
a question which our generation, perhaps more than any, seems always
ready to ask and never able to answer -- What is the meaning or worth of
human life? Heretofore this question has been dealt with chiefly by
theorists, from Ikhnaton and Lao-tse to Bergson and Spengler. The result
has been a kind of intellectual suicide: thought, by its very
development, seems to have destroyed the value and significance of life.
The growth and spread of knowledge, for which so many idealists and
reformers prayed, has resulted in a disillusionment which has almost
broken the spirit of our race.

"Astronomers have told us
that human affairs constitute but a moment in the trajectory of a star;
geologists have told us that civilization is but a precarious interlude
between ice ages; biologists have told us that all life is war, a
struggle for existence among individuals, groups, nations, alliances,
and species; historians have told us that 'progress' is a delusion,
whose glory ends in inevitable decay; psychologists have told us that
the will and the self are the helpless instruments of heredity and
environment, and that the once incorruptible soul is but a transient
incandescence of the brain. The Industrial Revolution has destroyed the
home, and the discovery of contraceptives is destroying the family, the
old morality, and perhaps (through the sterility of the intelligent) the
race. Love is analyzed into a physical congestion, and marriage becomes
a temporary physiological convenience slightly superior to promiscuity.
Democracy has degenerated into such corruption as only Milo's Rome knew;
and our youthful dreams of a socialist Utopia disappear as we see, day
after day, the inexhaustible acquisitiveness of men. Every invention
strengthens the strong and weakens the weak; every new mechanism
displaces men, and multiplies the horror of war. God, who was once the
consolation of our brief life, and our refuge in bereavement and
suffering, has apparently vanished from the scene; no telescope, no
microscope discovers him. Life has become, in that total perspective
which is philosophy, a fitful pullulation of human insects on the earth,
a planetary eczema that may soon be cured; nothing is certain in it
except defeat and death -- a sleep from which, it seems, there is no
awakening.

"We are driven to
conclude that the greatest mistake in human history was the discovery of
'truth.' It has not made us free, except from delusions that comforted
us and restraints that preserved us. It has not made us happy, for truth
is not beautiful, and did not deserve to be so passionately chased. As
we look on it now we wonder why we hurried so to find it. For it has
taken from us every reason for existence except the moment's pleasure
and tomorrow's trivial hope.

"This is the pass to
which science and philosophy have brought us. I, who have loved
philosophy for many years, now turn back to life itself, and ask you, as
one who has lived as well as thought, to help me understand. Perhaps the
verdict of those who have lived is different from that of those who have
merely thought. Spare me a moment to tell me what meaning life has for
you, what keeps you going, what help -- if any -- religion gives you,
what are the sources of your inspiration and your energy, what is the
goal or motive-force of your toil, where you find your consolations and
your happiness, where, in the last resort, your treasure lies. Write
briefly if you must; write at length and at leisure if you possibly can;
for every word from you will be precious to me.

Sincerely
yours,

Will Durant

Excerpts
From Durant's Introduction:

"It is not merely the War
of 1914 that has plunged us into pessimism, much less the economic
depression of these recent years; we have to do here with something far
deeper than a temporary diminution of our wealth, or even the death of
26,000,000 men; it is not our homes and our treasuries that are empty,
it is our 'hearts.' It seems impossible any longer to believe in the
permanent greatness of man, or to give life a meaning that cannot be
annulled by death. We move into an age of spiritual exhaustion and
despondency like that which hungered for the birth of Christ. . .

"All the hopes of the
Enlightenment were realized: science was free, and was remaking the
world. But while the technicians were using science to transform the
earth, philosophers were using it to transform the universe. Slowly, as
one science after another reported its findings, a picture was unfolded
of universal struggle and death; and decade by decade the optimism of
the nineteenth century yielded to the pessimism of today...

"Our schools are like our
inventions -- they offer us new ideas, new means of doing old things;
they elevate us from petty larceny to bank wreckages and Teapot Domes.
They stake all on intellect, only to find that character wins in the
end. We taught people how to read, and they enrich the 'tabloids' and
the 'talkies'; we invented the radio, and they pour out, a hundred times
more abundantly than before, the music of savages and the prejudices of
mobs. We gave them, through technology and engineering, unprecedented
wealth -- miraculous automobiles, luxurious travel, and spacious homes;
only to find that peace departs as riches come, that automobiles
over-ride morality and connive at crime, that quarrels grow bitterer as
the spoils increase, and that the largest houses are the bloodiest
battlegrounds of the ancient war between woman and man. We discovered
birth-control, and now it sterilizes the intelligent, multiplies the
ignorant, debases love with promiscuity, frustrates the educator,
empowers the demagogue, and deteriorates the race. We enfranchised all
men, and find them supporting and preserving, in nearly every city, a
nefarious 'machine' that blocks the road between ability and office; we
enfranchsed all women, and discovered that nothing is changed except
clerical expense. We dreamed of socialism, and find our own souls too
greedy to make it possible; in our hearts we too are capitalists, and
have no serious objection to becoming rich. . .

"The greatest question of
our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not
even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without
God."

H.L.
Mencken: "I do not believe in immortality..."

"You ask me, in brief, what
satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working
for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every
living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning.
Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation
between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy
organism -- in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really
idle...

"I have done, in the main,
exactly what I wanted to do. Its possible effects upon other people have
interested me very little. I have not written and published to please
other people, but to satisfy myself, just as a cow gives milk, not to
profit the dairyman, but to satisfy herself. I like to think that most of
my ideas have been sound ones, but I really don't care. The world may take
them or leave them. I have had my fun hatching them. . .

"The act of worship, as
carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than
ennobling. It involves grovelling before a Being who, if He really exists,
deserves to be denounced instead of respected. I see little evidence in
this world of the so-called goodness of God. On the contrary, it seems to
me that, on the strength of His daily acts, He must be set down a most
stupid, cruel and villainous fellow...I simply can't imagine revering the
God of war and politics, theology and cancer.

"I do not believe in
immortality, and have no desire for it. The belief in it issues from the
puerile egos of inferior men. In its Christian form it is little more than
a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on
this earth. What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline
to suspect that it has none. All I know about it is that, to me at least,
it is very amusing while it lasts. Even its troubles, indeed, can be
amusing. Moreover, they tend to foster the human qualities that I admire
most -- courage and its analogues. The noblest man, I think, is that one
who fights God, and triumphs over Him. I have had little of this to do.
When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however
good, could conceivably be good forever."

Sinclair
Lewis: Life is worth living without religion.

"It is, I think, an error
to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth
living...I know several young people who have been reared entirely without
thought of churches, of formal theology, or any other aspect of religion,
who have learned ethics not as a divine commandment but as a matter of
social convenience. They seem to me quite as happy, quite as filled with
purpose and with eagerness about life as any one trained to pass all his
troubles on to the Lord, or the Lord's local agent, the pastor.

"Their satisfaction comes
from functioning healthily, from physical and mental exercise, whether it
be playing tennis or tackling an astronomical problem. . .

"If I go to a play I do not
enjoy it less because I do not believe that it is divinely created and
divinely conducted, that it will last forever instead of stopping at
eleven, that many details of it will remain in my memory after a few
months, or that it will have any particular moral effect upon me. And I
enjoy life as I enjoy that play."

Charles Beard: The
world is not a mere bog.

"When
we analyze ourselves we find conflicting motives. We have moments of
shivering selfishness, when we think only of our personal gain. And we
have moments of exaltation when we feel the thrill of the prodigious and
hear the call to high action. That seems to be true of all men and women,
high and low, and the outcome in each case is a matter of proportion.

"For
myself I may say that as I look over the grand drama of history, I find
(or seem to find) amid the apparent chaos and tragedy, evidence of law and
plan and immense achievement of the human spirit in spite of disasters. I
am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women
trample themselves in the mire and die. Something magnificent is taking
place here amid the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to
intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious
heritage prevail. If there was no grand design in the beginning of the
universe, fragments of one are evident and mankind can complete the
picture. A knowledge of the good life is our certain philosophic heritage,
and technology has given us a power over nature which enables us to
provide the conditions of the good life for all the earth's multitudes.
That seems to me to be the most engaging possibility of the drama, and
faith in its potentialities keeps me working at it even in the worst hours
of disillusionment. The good life -- an end in itself to be loved and
enjoyed; and intelligent labor directed to the task of making the good
life prevail. There is the little philosophy, the circle of thought,
within which I keep my little mill turning.

"This
is the appearance of things as I see them, and even profound philosophers
can merely say what they find here."

Durant's
Advice To Those Contemplating Suicide:

"I received, in 1930,"
Durant says, "several letters, from separate persons, declaring their
intention of committing suicide. I have brought together here the
substance of my correspondence with them..." -- below are a few
excerpts from a long but interesting chapter:

"Let me confess at once
that I cannot answer, in any absolute or metaphysical sense, your question
as to the meaning of life. I suspect that there is some ultimate
significance to everything, though I know that our little minds will never
fathom it. For the meaning of anything must lie in its relation to some
whole of which it is a part; and how could any fragment or moment of life,
like you or me, pretend to rise out of its individual cell and survey or
understand the entirety of things? . . .

"The meaning of life, then,
must lie within itself; it must be independent of individual death, even
of national decay; it must be sought in life's own instinctive cravings
and natural fulfilments. Why, for example, should we ask for an ulterior
meaning to vitality and health? -- they would be goods in their own right,
even if they were not also means to racial ends. If you are sick beyond
cure I will grant you viaticum, and let you die; let me not to the ending
of botched lives put an impediment. But if you are well -- if you can
stand on your legs and digest your food -- forget your whining, and shout
your gratitude to the sun. . .

" 'Be a whole or join a
whole,' said Goethe. If we think of ourselves as part of a living (no
merely theoretical) group, we shall find life a little fuller, perhaps
even more significant. For to give life a meaning one must have a purpose
larger than one's self, and more enduring than one's life.

"...we can say of any life
in particular that its meaning lies in its relation to something larger
than itself. Hence the greater fulness of the married and parental, as
compared with the celibate and sterile, life; a man feels significant in
proportion as he contributes, physically or mentally, to the entity of
which he acknowledges himself a part. We who are too superior to belong to
groups, who are too wise to marry or too clever to have children, find
life empty and vain, and wonder has it any meaning. But ask the father of
sons and daughters 'What is the meaning of life?' and he will answer you
very simply: 'Feeding your family.' . . .

"Where, in the last resort,
does my treasure lie? -- in everything. A man should have many irons in
the fire; he should not let his happiness be bound up entirely with his
children, or his fame, or his prosperity, or even his health; but he
should be able to find nourishment for his content in any one of these,
even if all the rest are taken away. My last resort, I think, would be
Nature herself; short of all other gifts and goods, I should find, I hope,
sufficient courage for existence in any mood of field and sky, or, shorn
of sight, in some concourse of sweet sounds, or some poet's memory of a
day that smiled. All in all, experience is a marvelously rich panorama,
from which any sense should be able to draw sustenance for living."

"The
meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in
a certain way. It is not metaphysical, but ethical. It is not something
separate from life, but what makes it worth living -- which is to say, a
certain quality, depth, abundance, and intensity of life. In this sense,
the meaning of life is life itself, seeing in a certain way.
Meaning-of-life merchants generally feel let down by such a claim, since
it does not seem mysterious and majestic enough. It seems both too banal
and too exoteric...It takes the meaning-of-life question out of the hands
of a coterie of adepts or cognoscenti and returns it to the routine
business of everyday existence. It is just this kind of bathos that
Matthew sets up in his gospel, where he presents the Son of Man returning
in glory surrounded by angels for the Last Judgement. Despite this
off-the-peg cosmic imagery, salvation turns out to be an embarrassingly
prosaic affair -- a matter of feeding the hungry, giving drink to the
thirsty, welcoming the stranger, and visiting the imprisoned. It has no
'religious' glamour or aura whatsoever. Anybody can do it. The key to the
universe turns out to be not some shattering revelation, but something
which a lot of decent people do anyway, with scarcely a thought. Eternity
lies not in a grain of sand but in a glass of water. The cosmos revolves
on comforting the sick. When you act in this way, you are sharing in the
love which built the stars. To live in this way is not just to have life,
but to have it in abundance."

"Common
to [religions] is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of
God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and
exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent
above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which
belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I
shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate
this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is
no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

"The
individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity
and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the
world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison
and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The
beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of
development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the
Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful
writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.

"The
religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of
religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's
image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on
it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men
who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in
many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as
saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi,
and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

"How can
cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it
can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view,
it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this
feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it."

(The main
character, Folly, is speaking here). "Only look at those heavy,
solemn fellows who've devoted themselves to philosophic studies or to
serious and difficult business -- they have started to grow old even
before their youth, their vital spirits and animal juices all dried up as
a result of constant worry and the pressure of painful, intensive
cogitation. But my morons are all plump, with sleek and glistening skins.
. .never feeling any of the sorrows of old age unless by chance they pick
up some trouble by contagion from the wise. So true it is, that into each
life some rain must fall."

"There
are so many things in contemporary society that I dislike that it is
difficult to decide with which particular complaint to begin...

"The
first dislike...is the fact that everything and almost everybody is for
sale. Not only commodities and services, but ideas, arts, books,
persons, convictions, a feeling, a smile -- they all have been transferred
into commodities. And so is the whole of man, with all his facilities and
potentialities.

"From
this follows something else: fewer and fewer people can be trusted.
Not necessarily do I mean this in the crude sense of dishonesty in
business or underhandedness in personal relations, but in something that
goes much deeper. Being for sale, how can one be trusted to be the same
tomorrow as one is today? How do I know who he is, in whom I should put my
trust? Just that he will not murder or rob me? This, indeed, is
reassuring, but it is not much of a trust.

"This
is, of course, another way of saying that ever fewer people have
convictions. By conviction I mean an opinion rooted in the person's
character, in the total personality, and which therefore motivates action.
I do not mean simply an idea that remains central and can be easily
changed...

"Many
of the younger generation tend to have no character at all. By that
I do not mean that they are dishonest; on the contrary, one of the few
enjoyable things in the modern world is the honesty of a great part of the
younger generation. What I mean is that they live, emotionally and
intellectually speaking, from hand to mouth. They satisfy every need
immediately, have little patience to learn, cannot easily endure
frustration, and have no center within themselves, no sense of identity.
They suffer from this and question themselves, their identity, and the
meaning of life...

"What
I dislike most is summed up in the description in Greek mythology of the
'Iron Race' the Greeks saw emerging. This description is -- according to
Hesiod's Erga (lines 132-142) -- as follows: 'As generations pass,
they grow worse. A time will come when they have grown so wicked that they
will worship power; might will be right to them and reverence for the good
will cease to be. At last, when no man is angry anymore at wrongdoing or
feels shame in the presence of the miserable, Zeus will destroy them too.
And yet even then something might be done, if only the common people would
rise and put down rulers who oppress them.'"

"I do
indeed know what morbid compulsion feels like. Fungus, erosion, disease.
The taste of flannel in your mouth. The smell of asbestos in your brain. A
rock. A sinking heart, silence, taut limbs, a festering invasion from
within, seeping subversion, and a dull pressure on the brow, and in the
back regions of the skull. It starts like a fleeting whim, an airy,
frivolous notion, but it doesn't go; it stays; it sticks. . .It
foreshadows no joy -- and takes charge, and you might just as well hang
your head and drop your eyes and give right in. You might just as well
surrender at the start and steal that money, strike that match,
(masturbate), eat that whole quart of ice cream, grovel, dial that number,
or search that forbidden drawer or closet once again to handle the things
you're not supposed to know are there. You might just as well go right off
in whatever direction your madness lies and do that unwise, unpleasant,
immoral thing you don't want to that you know beforehand will leave you
dejected and demoralized afterward."

"There
is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the very
start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even
the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into
the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its
source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not
back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin,
ever deeper into human life...All birth means separation from the All, the
confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being
born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful
individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until
it is able once more to embrace the All...

"Looked
at with the bourgeois eye, my life had been a continuous descent from one
shattering to the next that left me more remote at every step from all
that was normal, permissible and healthful. The passing years had stripped
me of my calling, my family, my home. I stood outside all social circles,
alone, beloved by none, mistrusted by many, in unceasing and bitter
conflict with public opinion and morality: and though I lived in a
bourgeois setting, I was all the same an utter stranger to this world in
all I thought and felt. Religion, country, family, state, all lost their
value and meant nothing to me any more. The pomposity of the sciences,
societies, and arts disgusted me...at every turn my life was harsher, more
difficult, lonely and perilous. In truth, I had little cause to wish to
continue in that way which led on into ever thinner air, like the smoke in
Nietzsche's harvest song."

"Poverty
indeed is the strenuous life, -- without brass bands or uniforms or
hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one sees
the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and
marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that
poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be 'the transformation of
military courage,' and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in
need of.

"Among
us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once
more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We
despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his
inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the
money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We
have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of
poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the
unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are
or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any
moment irresponsibly, -- the more athletic trim, in short, the moral
fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men
were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we
put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought
of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is
time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a
state of opinion.

"It is
true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal
energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth
does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to
gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice
and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in
which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty
has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal
indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular
causes. We need no longer to hold our tongues or fear to vote the
revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of
promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces;
yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit,
and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would
need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we
personally were contented with our poverty.

"I
recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that
the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst
moral disease from which our civilization suffers."

"...our science is a drop, our ignorance
a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain, -- that the
world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger
world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no
positive idea.

"Agnostic positivism, of course, admits
this principle theoretically in the most cordial terms, but insists that
we must not turn it to any practical use. We have no right, this doctrine
tells us, to dream dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of
the universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to
call our highest interests. We must always wait for sensible evidence for
our beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no
hypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position in
abstracto. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs,
to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a
philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the other
would be his wisest cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is not only
inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations
to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because, as the
psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve
conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing
to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it
were not. If, for instance, I refuse to believe that the room is
getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire just as if it
still were warm. If I doubt that you are worthy of my confidence, I keep
you uninformed of all my secrets just as if you were unworthy of
the same. If I doubt the need of insuring my house, I leave it uninsured
as much as if I believed there were no need. And so if I must not believe
that the world is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining
ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on
certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an
irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when
inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be
for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and
consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing. . .

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that
life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
The 'scientific proof' that you are right may not be clear before the day
of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to
symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the
beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the
faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which
Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained:
'Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not
there.' "

"[I]n
our time, there are millions of people who have lost faith in any kind of
religion. Such people do not understand their religion any longer. While
life runs smoothly without religion, the loss remains as good as
unnoticed. But when suffering comes, it is another matter. That is when
people begin to seek a way out and to reflect about the meaning of life
and its bewildering and painful experiences.

"It
is significant that the psychological doctor (within my experience) is
consulted more by Jews and Protestants than by Catholics. This might be
expected, for the Catholic Church still feels responsible for the cura
animarum (the care of the soul's welfare). But in the scientific
age, the psychiatrist is apt to be asked the questions that once belonged
in the domain of the theologian. People feel that it makes, or would make,
a great difference if only they had a positive belief in a meaningful way
of life or in God and immortality. The specter of approaching death often
gives a powerful incentive to such thoughts. From time immemorial, men
have had ideas about a Supreme Being (one or several) and about the Land
of the Hereafter. Only today do they think they can do without such ideas.

"Because
we cannot discover God's throne in the sky with a radiotelescope or
establish (for certain) that a beloved father or mother is still about in
a more or less corporeal form, people assume that such ideas are 'not
true.' I would rather say that they are not 'true' enough, for
these are conceptions of a kind that have accompanied human life from
prehistoric times, and that still break through into consciousness at any
provocation.

"Modern
man may assert that he can dispense with them, and he may bolster his
opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth.
Or he may ever regret the loss of his convictions. But since we are
dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human
understanding, and there is no means of proving immortality), why should
we bother about evidence? Even if we did not know by reason our need for
salt in our food, we should nonetheless profit from its use. We might
argue that the use of salt is a mere illusion of taste or a superstition;
but it would still contribute to our well-being. Why, then, should we
deprive ourselves of views that would prove helpful in crises and would
give a meaning to our existence?

"And
how do we know that such ideas are not true? Many people would agree with
me if I stated flatly that such ideas are probably illusions. What they
fail to realize is that the denial is as impossible to 'prove' as the
assertion of religious belief. We are entirely free to choose which point
of view we take; it will in any case be an arbitrary decision.

"There
is, however, a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts
that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be useful. Man
positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to
his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe. He
can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced that they
make sense; he is crushed when, on top of all his misfortunes, he has to
admit that he is taking part in a 'tale told by an idiot.'

"It
is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man...A sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond
mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and
miserable."

"Most
of us are never alone. You may withdraw into the mountains and live as a
recluse, but when you are physically by yourself, you will have with you all
your ideas, your experiences, your traditions, your knowledge of what has been.
The Christian monk in a monastery cell is not alone; he is with his conceptual
Jesus, with his theology, with the beliefs and dogmas of his particular
conditioning. Similarly, the sannyasi in India who withdraws from the world and
lives in isolation is not alone, for he too lives with his memories.

"I am talking of an aloneness in which the
mind is totally free from the past, and only such a mind is virtuous, for only
in this aloneness is there innocence. Perhaps you will say, 'That is too much to
ask. One cannot live like that in this chaotic world, where one has to go to the
office every day, earn a livelihood, bear children, endure the nagging of one's
wife or husband, and all the rest of it.' But I think what is being said is
directly related to everyday life and action; otherwise, it has no value at all.
You see, out of this aloneness comes a virtue that is virile and which brings an
extraordinary sense of purity and gentleness. It doesn't matter if one makes
mistakes; that is of very little importance. What matters is to have this
feeling of being completely alone, uncontaminated, for it is only such a mind
that can know or be aware of that which is beyond the word, beyond the name,
beyond all the projections of
imagination."

“All
human anxiety and fear is fundamentally -- which means from birth onwards
-- fear of separation. Fear makes us lonely. Fear isolates us. Fear
strikes us dumb. Does fear and anxiety also isolate us from the foundation
of our being, from the meaning of life, from God?...

"Our
numerous fears and anxieties continually crystallize into a general
anxiety about life. It is this heightened and diffused anxiety which
spreads, takes on independent existence and robs men and women of their
self-confidence and their very identity. It can be described as the fear
of fear. It wins the upper hand and drives us into a corner if we fail to
identify it for what it is, or if we try to ignore it. Then we feel that
our situation is hopeless. We no longer know who we really are.

"Christian
faith identifies this anxiety with abandonment by God. It is a separation
phobia, a dread of separation from the foundation of existence, the
meaning of life, what is worthy of trust. To identify anxiety and give it
a name is not enough to free us from it, or to let us conquer it.

"We
have to be 'released' from anxiety. That is the experience of faith in
anxiety. When we remember Christ's fear and anxiety, what he has already
done with us and for us is repeated: he has endured the fear of being
forsaken by God -- the fear of separation; and he has opened up a way
through this experience for those who trust and follow him. In fellowship
with him we discover that we are released from anxiety as we endure it. By
recognizing our anxiety in his, and by seeing it as abolished in his, we
experience that 'blessed' anxiety which kindles an unconquerable hope.”

"If
one does not examine the megatechnic bribe too circumspectly, it would
appear to be a generous bargain. Provided the consumer agrees to accept
what megatechnics offers, in quantities favorable to the continued
expansion of the whole power system, he will be granted all the
perquisites, privileges, seductions, and pleasures of the affluent
society. If only he demands no goods or services except those that can be
organized or manufactured by megatechnics, he will without doubt enjoy a
higher standard of material culture -- at least of a certain specialized
kind -- than any other society has ever achieved before. If anything, the
luxuries will be more plentiful than the comforts, though many basic human
necessities that do not lend themselves to megatechnics will in fact be
starved out of existence. In 'Fun City' one is not supposed to notice
their absence.

"For
many members of the American community, which has been hastily subscribing
to this system under the specious title of the 'Great Society,' or the
'Economy of Megalopolis,' the further development of this process-centered
technology seems not merely inevitable but desirable: the next step in
'Progress.' And who dares resist Progress? Given the proper reward a
population sufficiently coddled by the Welfare State asks for nothing
better than what the market offers.

"Those
already conditioned from infancy by school training and television
tutelage to regard megatechnics as the highest point in man's 'conquest of
nature,' will accept this totalitarian control of their own development
not as a horrid sacrifice but as a highly desirable fulfillment, looking
forward to being constantly attached to the Big Brain, as they are now
attached to radio stations by portable transistor sets even while walking
the streets. By accepting these means they expect that every human problem
will be solved for them, and the only human sin will be that of failing to
obey instructions. Their 'real' life will be confined within the frame of
a television screen."

"Most
men tolerate life without grumbling too much and believe thus in
the value of existence, but precisely because everyone wills himself alone
and stands his ground alone, and does not step out of himself as do those
exceptional men, everything extrapersonal escapes his notice entirely, or
seems at the most a faint shadow. Thus the value of life for ordinary,
everyday man is based only on his taking himself to be more important than
the world."

"In
man [the] art of simulation reaches its peak: here deception, flattery,
lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed
splendor, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before
others and before oneself -- in short, the constant fluttering around the
single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing
is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could
make its appearance among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and
dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees
'forms'; their feeling nowhere leads into truth, but contents itself with
the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blindman's bluff
on the backs of things."

"...life
is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects
this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this
terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy,
where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his 'ideas' are not
true, he uses them as trenches for the defence of his existence, as
scarecrows to frighten away reality.

"The man
with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic
'ideas' and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is
problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth -- that
to live is to feel oneself lost -- he who accepts it has already begun to
find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked,
he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic,
ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his
salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These
are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is
rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is
lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never
comes up against his own reality."

"Man is
but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of
water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man
would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows
that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the
universe knows nothing of this.

"All our
divinity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and
not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavor, then, to
think well; this is the principle of morality.

"A
thinking reed. It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but
from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess
worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom;
by thought I comprehend the world."

Socrates:
Now compare our condition with this: Picture men living in a cave which
has a wide mouth open towards the light. They are kept in the same places,
looking forward only away from the mouth and unable to turn their heads,
for their legs and necks have been fixed in chains from birth. A fire is
burning higher up at their backs, and between it and the prisoners there
is a road with a low wall built at its side, like the screen over which
puppet players put up their puppets.

Glaucon:
All that I see.

Socrates:
See, again, then, men walking under cover of this low wall carrying past
all sorts of things, copies of men and animals, in stone or wood and other
materials; some of them may be talking and others not.

Glaucon:
This is a strange sort of comparison and these are strange prisoners.

Socrates:
They are like ourselves. They see nothing but their own shadows, or one
another's, which the fire throws on the wall of the cave. And so too with
the things carried past. If they were able to talk to one another,
wouldn't they think that in naming the shadows they were naming the things
that went by? And if their prison sent back an echo whenever one of those
who went by said a word, what could they do but take it for the voice of
the shadow?

Glaucon:
By Zeus, they would.

Socrates:
The only real things for them would be the shadows of the puppets.

Glaucon:
Certainly.

Socrates:
Now see how it will be if something frees them from their chains: When
one is freed and forced to get on his feet and turn his head and walk and
look towards the light -- and all this hurts, and because the light is too
bright, he isn't able to see the things whose shadows he saw before --
what will he answer, if someone says that all he has seen till now, was
false and a trick, but that now he sees more truly? And if someone points
out to him the things going by and asks him to name them, won't he be at a
loss? And won't he take the shadows he saw before as more real than these
things?

Glaucon:
Much more real.

Socrates:
And if he were forced to look straight at the light itself, wouldn't he
start back with pained eyes? And if someone pulled him up the rough and
hard ascent and forced him out into the light of the sun, wouldn't he be
angry? And wouldn't his eyes be too full of light to make out even one of
the things we say are real?

Glaucon:
Yes, that would be so at first.

Socrates:
He would need to get used to the light before he could see things up
there. At first he would see shadows best, and after that reflections in
still water of men and other things, and only later these things
themselves. Then he would be ready to look at the moon and stars, and
would see the sky by night better than the sun and the sun's light by day.
So, at last, I take it, he'd be able to look upon the sun itself, and see
it not through the seemings and images of itself in water and away from
its true place, but in its own field and as it truly is.

Glaucon:
So. [meaning, "it is so," not "so what?"]

Socrates:
And with that he will discover that it is the sun which gives the
seasons and the years, and is the chief in the field of the things which
are seen, and in some way the cause even of all the things he had been
seeing before. If he now went back in his mind to where he was living
before, and to what his brother slaves took to be wisdom there, wouldn't
he be happy at the change and pity them?

Glaucon:
Certainly, he would.

Socrates:
And if their way was to reward those who were quickest to make out the
shadows as they went by and to note in memory which came before as a rule,
and which together, would he care very much about such rewards? And, if he
were to go down again out of the sunlight into his old place, would not
his eyes get suddenly full of the dark? And if there were to be a
competition then with the prisoners who had never moved out and he had to
do his best in judging the shadows before his eyes got used to the dark --
which needs more than a minute -- wouldn't he be laughed at? Wouldn't they
say he had come back from his time on high with his eyes in very bad
condition so that there was no point in going up there? And if they were
able to get their hands on the man who attempted to take their chains off
and guide them up, wouldn't they put him to death?

Glaucon:
They certainly would!

Socrates:
Take this comparison, dear Glaucon, with all we have said before. The
world seen through the eyes, that is the prison house; the light of the
fire is like the power of the sun; and if you see the way out and that
looking upon things of the upper world as the going up of the soul to the
field of true thought, you will have my hopes or beliefs about it and they
are what you desired -- though only God knows if they are right. Be that
as it may, what seems clear to me is that in the field of deep knowledge
the last thing to be seen, and hardly seen, is the idea of the good. When
that is seen, our decision has to be that it is truly the cause, for all
things, of all that is beautiful and right. In the world that is to be
seen, it gives birth to light and to the lord of light, but in the field
of thought it is itself the master cause of reason and all that is true;
and anyone who is to act wisely in private or public must have seen
this...

God
is not "out there." He is in Bonhoeffer's words "the
'beyond' in the midst of our life," a depth of reality reached
"not on the borders of life but at its centre," not by any
flight of the alone to the alone, but, in Kierkegaard's fine phrase, by a
"deeper immersion in existence." For the word "God"
denotes the ultimate depth of all our being, the creative ground and
meaning of all our existence.

...the line
between those who believe in God and those who do not bears little
relation to their profession of the existence or non-existence of such a
Being. It is a question, rather, of their openness to the holy, the
sacred, in the unfathomable depths of even the most secular relationship.
As Martin Buber puts it of the person who professedly denies God,

When
he, too, who abhors the name, and believes himself to be godless, gives
his whole being to addressing the Thou of his life, as a Thou
that cannot be limited by another, he addresses God.

For in the conditioned he has
seen and responded to the unconditional. He has touched the hem of the
eternal.

"Religion
is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror
of the unknown and partly...the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder
brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is
the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat,
fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no
wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . .

We want to
stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good
facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it
is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not
merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The
whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental
despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear
people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable
sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of
self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world
frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if
it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what
these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs
knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering
after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words
uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free
intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time
toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the
future that our intelligence can create."

"There
is much forgetfulness, much callow disrespect for what is past or alien;
but there is a fund of vigour, goodness, and hope such as no nation ever
possessed before. In what sometimes looks like American greediness and
jostling for the front place, all is love of achievement, nothing is
unkindness; it is a fearless people, and free from malice, as you might
see in their eyes and gestures, even if their conduct did not prove it.
This soil is propitious to every seed, and tares must needs grow in it;
but why should it not also breed clear thinking, honest judgment, and
rational happiness? These things are indeed not necessary to existence,
and without them America might long remain rich and populous like many a
barbarous land in the past; but in that case its existence would be
hounded, like theirs, by falsity and remorse. . .

"[Academic]
[f]reedom, when nominally allowed, was a provisional freedom; if your
wanderings did not somehow bring you back to orthodoxy you were a
misguided being, no matter how disparate from the orthodox might be the
field from which you fetched your little harvest; and if you could not be
answered you were called superficial. Most spirits are cowed by such
disparagement; but even those who snap their fingers at it do not escape;
they can hardly help feeling that in calling a spade a spade they are
petulant and naughty...it is only here and there that a very great and
solitary mind, like that of Spinoza, can endure obloquy without bitterness
or can pass through perverse controversies without contagion."

"The unique characteristic of a dead life is
that it is a life of which the Other makes himself the guardian...To be
forgotten is to be made the object of an attitude of another, and of an implicit
decision on the part of the Other. To be forgotten is, in fact, to be resolutely
apprehended forever as one element dissolved into a mass (the 'great feudal
lords of the thirteenth century,' the 'bourgeois Whigs' of the eighteenth, the
Soviet officials,' etc.); it is in no way to be annihilated, but it is to
lose one's personal existence in order to be constituted with others in a
collective existence...

"Thus the very existence of death alienates us
wholly in our own life to the advantage of the Other. To be dead is to be a prey
for the living. This means therefore that the one who tries to grasp the meaning
of his future death must discover himself as the future prey of others...

"So long as I live I can escape what I am
for the Other by revealing to myself by my freely posited ends that I am
nothing and that I make myself be what I am; so long as I live, I can give the
lie to what others discover in me, by projecting myself already toward other
ends and in every instance by revealing that my dimension of being-for-myself is
incommensurable with my dimension of being-for-others...to die is to be
condemned no matter what ephemeral victory one has won over the Other; even if
one has made use of the Other to 'sculpture one's own statue,' to die is to
exist only through the Other, and to owe to him one's meaning and the very
meaning of one's victory."

"The
vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in
the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the
individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which
actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in
continual becoming without being; in continual desire without
satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life
consists. . .

"The
scenes of our life resemble pictures in rough mosaic; they are ineffective
from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem
beautiful. That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain
it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better
things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The
present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and
serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when
they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad
interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so
unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in
expectation of which they lived."

"We
must, indeed, take care to be tactful, and not mix ourselves up uninvited
in other people's business. On the other hand we must not forget the
danger lurking in the reserve which our practical daily life forces on us.
We cannot possibly let ourselves get frozen into regarding everyone we do
not know as an absolute stranger. No man is ever completely and
permanently a stranger to his fellow-man. Man belongs to man. Man has
claims on man. Circumstances great or small may arise which make
impossible the aloofness which we have to practise in daily life, and
bring us into active relations with each other, as men to men. The law of
reserve is condemned to be broken down by the claims of the heart, and
thus we all get into a position where we must step outside our aloofness,
and to one of our fellow-men become ourselves a man."

"Seeing.
We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb -- if not
ultimately, at least essentially. Fuller being is closer union...But let
us emphasise the point: union increases only through an increase in
consciousness, that is to say in vision. And that, doubtless, is why the
history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of ever
more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more
to be seen. After all, do we not judge the perfection of an animal, or the
supremacy of a thinking being, by the penetration and synthetic power of
their gaze? To try to see more and better is not a matter of whim or
curiosity or self-indulgence. To see or to perish is the very
condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe, by reason of
the mysterious gift of existence. And this, in superior measure, is man's
condition. . .

"When
studied narrowly in himself by anthropologists or jurists, man is a tiny,
even a shrinking, creature. His over-pronounced individuality conceals
from our eyes the whole to which he belongs; as we look at him our minds
incline to break nature up into pieces and to forget both its deep
inter-relations and its measureless horizons: we incline to all that is
bad in anthropocentrism. And it is this that still leads scientists to
refuse to consider man as an object of scientific scrutiny except through
his body.

"The
time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe -- even a
positivist one -- remains unsatisfying unless it covers the within as well
as the without of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that
which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a
coherent picture of the world."

“The
anxiety of meaninglessness is anxiety about the loss of an ultimate
concern, of a meaning which gives meaning to all meanings. This anxiety is
aroused by the loss of a spiritual center, of an answer, however symbolic
and indirect, to the question of the meaning of existence. . .

“The
anxiety of emptiness is aroused by the threat of nonbeing to the special
contents of the spiritual life. A belief breaks down through external
events or inner processes: one is cut off from creative participation in a
sphere of culture, one feels frustrated about something which one had
passionately affirmed, one is driven from devotion to one object to
devotion to another and again on to another, because the meaning of each
of them vanishes and the creative eros is transformed into indifference or
aversion. Everything is tried and nothing satisfies. The contents of the
tradition, however excellent, however praised, however loved once, lose
their power to give content today. And present culture is even less able
to provide the content. Anxiously one turns away from all concrete
contents and looks for an ultimate meaning, only to discover that it was
precisely the loss of a spiritual center which took away the meaning from
the special contents of the spiritual life. But a spiritual center cannot
be produced intentionally, and the attempt to produce it only produces
deeper anxiety. The anxiety of emptiness drives us to the abyss of
meaninglessness.”

"My lapse
from faith occurred as is usual among people on our level of education. In
most cases, I think, it happens thus: a man lives like everybody else, on
the basis of principles not merely having nothing in common with religious
doctrine, but generally opposed to it; religious doctrine does not play a
part in life, in intercourse with others it is never encountered, and in a
man's own life he never has to reckon with it. Religious doctrine is
professed far away from life and independently of it. If it is
encountered, it is only as an external phenomenon disconnected from life.

"Then as
now, it was and is quite impossible to judge by a man's life and conduct
whether he is a believer or not. If there be a difference between a man
who publicly professes orthodoxy and one who denies it, the difference is
not in favor of the former. Then as now, the public profession and
confession of orthodoxy was chiefly met with among people who were dull
and cruel and who considered themselves very important. Ability, honesty,
reliability, good-nature and moral conduct, were often met with among
unbelievers.

"The
schools teach the catechism and send the pupils to church, and government
officials must produce certificates of having received communion. But a
man of our circle who has finished his education and is not in the
government service may even now (and formerly it was still easier for him
to do so) live for ten or twenty years without once remembering that he is
living among Christians and is himself reckoned a member of the orthodox
Christian Church.

"So that,
now as formerly, religious doctrine, accepted on trust and supported by
external pressure, thaws away gradually under the influence of knowledge
and experience of life which conflict with it, and a man very often lives
on, imagining that he still holds intact the religious doctrine imparted
to him in childhood whereas in fact not a trace of it remains."

"When
this self gets to weakness, gets to confusedness, as it were, then the
breaths gather round him. He takes to himself those particles of light and
descends into the heart. When the person in the eye turns away, then he
becomes non-knowing of forms.

"He is
becoming one, he does not see, they say; he is becoming one, he does not
smell, they say; he is becoming one, he does not taste, they say; he is
becoming one, he does not speak, they say; he is becoming one, he does not
hear, they say; he is becoming one, he does not think, they say; he is
becoming one, he does not touch, they say; he is becoming one, he does not
know, they say. The point of his heart becomes lighted up and by that
light the self departs either through the eye or through the head or
through other apertures of the body. And when he thus departs, life
departs after him. And when life thus departs, all the vital breaths
depart after him. He becomes one with intelligence. What has intelligence
departs with him. His knowledge and his work take hold of him as also his
past experience.

"Verily,
when a person departs from this world, he goes to the air. It opens out
there for him like the hole of a chariot wheel. Through that he goes
upwards. He goes to the sun. It opens out there for him like the hole of a
lambara. Through that he goes upwards. He reaches the moon. It
opens out there for him like the hole of a drum. Through that he goes
upwards. He goes to the world free from grief, free from snow. There he
dwells eternal years."

* The passage above can be found
in Mircea Eliade, From Primitives To Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the
History of Religions (1977)

"...the
"brainy" economy designed to produce...happiness is a fantastic
vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or
collapse -- providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve
ends with incessant streams of almost inescapeable noise and visual
distractions. The perfect "subject" for the aims of this economy
is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably
using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all
places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper,
to magazine, keeping in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series
of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other
sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity --
shock treatments -- as "human interest" shots of criminals,
mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings.
The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly
manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial
gratification with a new desire...Generally speaking, the civilized man
does not know what he wants. He works for success, fame, a happy marriage,
fun, to help other people, or to be a "real person." But these
are not real wants because they are not actual things. They are the
by-products, the flavors and atmospheres of real things -- shadows which
have no existence apart from some substance. Money is the perfect symbol
of all such desires, being a mere symbol of real wealth, and to make it
one's goal is the most blatant example of confusing measurements with
reality."

...I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

"There
is a wealth of humbug in this life, but the multitudinous little humbugs
have been classified by Chinese Buddhists under two big humbugs: fame and
wealth. There is a story that Emperor Ch'ienlung once went up a hill
overlooking the sea during his trip to South China and saw a great number
of sailing ships busily plying the China Sea to and fro. He asked his
minister what the people in those hundreds of ships were doing, and his
minister replied that he saw only two ships, and their names were 'Fame'
and 'Wealth'. Many cultured persons were able to escape the lure of
wealth, but only the very greatest could escape the lure of fame. Once a
monk was discoursing with his pupil on these two sources of worldly cares,
and said: 'It is easier to get rid of the desire for money than to get rid
of the desire for fame. Even retired scholars and monks still want to be
distinguished and well-known among their company. They want to give public
discourses to a large audience, and not retire to a small monastery
talking to one pupil, like you and me now.' The pupil replied: 'Indeed,
Master, you are the only man in the world who has conquered the desire for
fame!' And the Master smiled."